1. Field of Invention
This invention is directed to systems and methods for monitoring and diagnosing systems using wireless sensors.
2. Description of Related Art
Large, complex electro-mechanical systems, such as modern printers, require precise interaction of components to ensure healthy operation. Using advanced diagnostics helps reduce maintenance costs and extend the life of such systems. Current techniques for monitoring and diagnosing subsystems, such as paper paths of printers or copiers, can be accomplished by using sensors. To diagnose faults and errors resulting from degrading components and subsystems, precise knowledge of the position, the motion and/or the condition of the components and subsystems at a given moment is needed. This can be accomplished by a monitoring system that uses sensors.
In a printer, the paper path is a critical system that requires monitoring. By measuring the motion of paper sheets along the path using fault-tolerant measurement techniques, it is possible to diagnostically evaluate critical components. There are two ways to implement such measuring techniques into large systems, such as a printer system. One is to design the measurement capability into the system at the factory. The second way is to retrofit existing systems by service personnel. In this second way, a technician can either fit the measurement apparatus onto a printer and leave it there permanently, or can install the apparatus onto the system only for that particular repair session.
Many known techniques for monitoring and diagnosing subsystems, such as paper paths, are based on infrared (IR) sensors. When used to monitor the paper paths of printers, such sensors can detect the edge of paper sheets. One such IR sensor is the optical sensor found in an optical mouse. When used in a printer for monitoring and diagnosis, optical sensors can collect velocity and positional data.
However, these optical sensors are unable to monitor high-speed operations and rely heavily on the aggregate velocity measurements of many optical sensors. Increased computational power of digital electronics, the availability of wireless electronics, and the availability of microelectronic sensing components enable use of low cost collaborative sensor and diagnostic systems.